Michio Kaku (born 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. He is professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes online blogs and articles. He has written three New York Times best sellers: Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), and The Future of the Mind (2014). Kaku has hosted several TV specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.

Why Michio Kaku wants to avoid alien contact at all costs

If aliens do exist, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku posits, why would they want anything to do with us? It would be like a hunter talking to a squirrel, he suggests, and he has a great point. Hollywood and science fiction novels have conditioned us for years to believe that aliens either want to hang out on our intellectual level and learn from us... or destroy us. If alien life really does have the technology and know-how to make it all the way here, perhaps we should just play it cool and not assume that we are the top species in the universe.
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We have this mental image that a flying saucer will circle the White House lawn, land on the White House lawn and give us a bounty of all sorts of technological goodies to initiate an age of Aquarius on the planet earth. Personally, I don’t think that’s going to happen. For example, if you’re in the forest do you go out and talk to the squirrels and the deer? Maybe you do for a while, but after a while, you get bored because they don’t talk back to you because they have nothing interesting to tell you because they can’t relate to our values and our ideas. If you go down to an anthill do you go down to the ants and say I bring you trinkets; I bring you bees; take me to your aunt queen; I give you nuclear energy. So I think for the most part the aliens are probably not going to be interested in us because we’re so arrogant to believe that we have something to offer them. Realize that they could be thousands, maybe millions of years ahead of us in technology and they may have no interest in interacting with us in the same way that we don’t necessarily want to deal with the squirrels and the deer in the forest.
Now some people say that we should not try to make contact with them because they could be potentially dangerous. For the most part, I think they’re going to be peaceful because they’ll be thousands of years ahead of us, but we cannot take the chance. So I personally believe that we should not try to advertise our existence to alien life in outer space because of the fact that we don’t know their intentions.

Michio Kaku comments on Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s visions of A.I.

At a brief panel Michio Kaku expresses his views on robots and on Zuckerberg and Musk about their vision of A.I. At NEXT 2017, the Hitachi event about the digital transformation of business. September 2017.

NASA announced the discovery of seven Earth-sized planets around a star about 40 light years away from Earth. All seven could have water, which is key to life like ours, and three of them fall in the habitable zone. Michio Kaku, CBS News science and futurist contributor and physics professor at the City University of New York, joins "CBS This Morning" with more on this new discovery.
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Michio Kaku shares one of the most humiliating event in his life.
Michio Kaku is a Japanese-American futurist, theoretical physicist and popularizer of science. Kaku is a professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York.
Michio Kaku Videos -
Does the universe have a purpose or meaning | Michio Kaku vs Richard Dawkins Debate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmkrI-K7yBo
Fastest way to reach Mars in 20 minutes at no cost - Connectome
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj36ECOLKAY

Michio Kaku - Voyager Probe

Michio Kaku - Voyager Probe

Michio Kaku - Dark Matter

Michio Kaku - Dark Matter

Who will be rich and poor in future? - Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku explains the main reason that will be a key factor in determining which countries will be poor and which will be rich in near future. Countries which only rely on commodities like oil is getting cheaper and cheaper every year but those who depend on intellectual capital, the power of the mind is becoming more and more precious.
http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/10/09/emerging-and-developing-economies-much-more-optimistic-than-rich-countries-about-the-future/
http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/poverty-the-past-present-and-future
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/07/what-makes-countries-rich-or-poor/

Why are we wasting money on Mars Project?
It certainly doesn't come cheap. It's hard to calculate a total price tag, but over the 48 years that NASA has been launching missions to Mars, Americans have spent a significant sum. The Viking missions alone cost nearly $1 billion — in 1970s dollars. The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity cost a total of about $1 billion to build and operate as well. Curiosity, as the Mars Science Laboratory rover is known, is over budget at $2.5 billion.
But at the end of the day as Professor Kaku Says; its like an insurance plan for humanity that will help us sustain when earth will no longer be habitable.
Some other articles regarding exploration of mars and its pros and cons -
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/30/science/la-sci-mars-science-cost-20120730
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/552655.stm
http://theconversation.com/of-course-space-exploration-is-worth-the-money-42926

Michio Kaku - Are there Extra Dimensions?

Extra dimensions—beyond length, width, height—seem like the stuff of science fiction. What would extra dimensions be like?
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Does the universe have a purpose or meaning | Michio Kaku vs Richard Dawkins Debate

Anyone who expresses a more definitive response to the question is claiming access to knowledge not based on empirical foundations. This remarkably persistent way of thinking, common to most religions and some branches of philosophy, has failed badly in past efforts to understand, and thereby predict the operations of the universe and our place within it.
To assert that the universe has a purpose implies the universe has intent. And intent implies a desired outcome. But who would do the desiring? And what would a desired outcome be? That carbon-based life is inevitable? Or that sentient primates are life's neurological pinnacle? Are answers to these questions even possible without expressing a profound bias of human sentiment? Of course humans were not around to ask these questions for 99.9999% of cosmic history. So if the purpose of the universe was to create humans then the cosmos was embarrassingly inefficient about it.
http://www.templeton.org/purpose/essay_Tyson.html
More videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsZ-mvIH7xo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/06/purpose-of-the-universe-neil-degrasse-tyson-christian-de-duve-video_n_2246472.html

An evening with Dr Michio Kaku (ft Veritasium)

World-renowned physicist Dr. Michio Kaku, with the help of THINK INC., visited Australia in June 2014, captivating the public with his superhuman ability to comprehensively communicate complex scientific concepts and advancements (both current and future) to audiences across all degrees of interest in science, from professional to personal to casual.
These are some of the highlights of his Melbourne talk, filmed at MCEC on June 6th 2014.
Dr. Michio Kaku the co-founder of string theory, which proposes to revolutionise the way we understand the physical world. He is also the author of critically acclaimed books such as Parallel Worlds (2004), Physics of the Impossible (2008), and most recently the bestselling The Future of the Mind (2014).
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Michio Kaku describes how our prefrontal cortex disengages as we dream, thus suppressing the fact-checking component of our consciousness. Dr. Kaku's latest book is The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (http://goo.gl/G06jvb).
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Transcript: There’s a whole lore about dreaming. In fact, Sigmund Freud wrote a book called The Interpretation of Dreams which many people think is the foundation of psychoanalysis. Well scientists now have looked at Freudian psychology and the brain using all these modern techniques. And first of all we realize that perhaps Sigmund Freud wasn’t totally wrong. There are many textbooks which simply dismiss Freudian psychology calling it nuts. That is nothing but the sexual fantasies of a repressed Venetian scientist of the last century. But now we realize there’s more to it. First of all the unconscious mind. We can actually see the brain in motion and we realize that much of the activity is totally unconscious. Just like what Freud predicted.
And Freud also said there is the ego, the id and the superego, that we are in a constant battle with our desires and our conscious. And we see that now with brain scans. The ego is basically your prefrontal cortex. That is who you are. When you wonder where am I anyway. Well, you’re right there. You are sitting right behind your forehead. And then your desires. We see the pleasure center right there at the center of the brain. That is the libido. We see where the pleasure center is located. And then your conscience is right behind your eyes. The orbital frontal cortex right behind your eyes is where your conscience is. And so we actually see that in motion.
If you were to see a chocolate cake you would see these three parts of the brain going zippity back and forth like a ping pong ball because you’re constantly debating the pleasure of eating a chocolate cake versus how fat you’re gonna become and all the sugar and the calories that you don’t really need. So we see the beginnings of Freudian psychology coming out of brain scans. And now dreams. Freud had a whole collection of interpretation of dreams. Scientists have looked at and said, “Nonsense.” Now we understand the physiology of the dreaming process. And we realize that it comes at the back of the brain, the very primitive part of the brain and that certain parts of the brain are shut off when you dream. First of all your prefrontal cortex is basically shut off, it’s quiet. Your orbital frontal cortex that is your conscience is also shut off. But that part of the brain is your fact checker. The part of the brain that said, “Hmmm, that’s not right. Something’s wrong” is right behind your eyes. That’s shut off.
What is active when you dream is your amygdala. Now what does your amygdala govern? Fear and emotions. And so right then you know that when you dream the active part of the brain is not the fact checker, not the rational brain – it’s the emotional brain, the fearful brain that is active when you dream. And then there’s some superstition called lucid dreaming where you can actually control the direction of the dream. Well that superstition last year became science fact. At the Max Planck Institute in Germany they were able to show once and for all that lucid dreaming is testable, reproducible – it is real. And here’s how they did it. They took a person who was about to go to sleep and told them that when you dream clench your right fist and then clench your left fist. Now when you dream you are paralyzed. You cannot move when you dream.
Otherwise we’d be able to carry out all sorts of horrible things and destroy ourselves. So we are paralyzed when we dream. But when this person went into a dream state you can clearly see that the brain initiated orders to clench your right fist and your left fist. In other words, he was conscious while he was dreaming. There are many Buddhist texts, many texts hundreds of years old that give you the outlines of how to control dreams. Lucid dreaming. We now know that it’s not hogwash that you can actually do this. You can actually direct the course of your dream. And then one day we may be able to brain scan the brain as you dream and put it on a screen. In which case somebody will be able to see you dream and know the direction of the dream and you are conscious of the process. In other words, the movie Inception is not totally hogwash.
Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton

Michio Kaku on Singularity 1 on 1: Science is the Engine of Prosperity!

http://www.singularityweblog.com/michio-kaku-future-of-the-mind/
Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, bestselling author, acclaimed public speaker, renowned futurist, and popularizer of science. As co-founder of String Field Theory, Dr. Kaku carries on Einstein's quest to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into a single grand unified theory of everything. You will not be surprised to hear that Michio Kaku has been on my guest dream-list since I started Singularity 1 on 1, and I was beyond ecstatic to finally have an opportunity to speak to him.
During our 90 min conversation with Dr. Michio Kaku we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: why he shifted his focus from the universe to the human mind; his definition, classification and ranking of consciousness; his take on the Penrose-Hameroff Orch OR model; Newton, Einstein, determinism and free will; whether the brain is a classical computer or not; Norman Doidge's work on neuro-plasticity and The Brain That Changes Itself; the underlying reality of everything; his dream to finish what Einstein has started and know the mind of God; The Future of the Mind; mind-uploading and space travel at the speed of light; Moore's Law and D-Wave's quantum computer; the Human Brain Project and whole brain simulation; alternatives paths to AI and the Turing Test as a way of judging progress; cryonics and what is possible and impossible...

Michio Kaku: The Supergenius

Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studios to discuss his latest book, The Future of the Mind (http://goo.gl/1mcGeb). Here Dr. Kaku discusses Asperger syndrome, autism, savants, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton... and the characters on CBS' The Big Bang Theory.
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Transcript - If you watch the Big Bang Theory on CBS television you see these clueless nerds who are doormats when ti comes to the opposite sex, right. And you realize is there any basis in reality? First of all none of my friends are like that and all my friends are physicists, right. Well there is a kernel of truth and that is some of these individuals may suffer from something called Asperger's Syndrome which is a mild form of autism. These people are clueless when it comes to social interactions. They don't look you in the eye, for example. And yet they have fantastic mental and mathematical capabilities.
We think, for example, that Isaac Newton had Asperger's. The greatest scientist of all time was very strange. He had no friends to speak of. He could not carry a decent conversation and yet here he was spitting out some of the greatest theories in the history of science. Calculus. The Universal Law of Gravitation. The Theory of Optics. And we think he had Asperger's Syndrome. Now Asperger's Syndrome is a mild form of autism and in autism we have what are called savants. That is people that have an IQ of maybe 80 but have incredible mathematical and musical abilities. In fact, some of these individuals can hear one symphony and just play it by memory on a piano.
Other people could be in a helicopter, have a helicopter ride over Manhattan, see the entire New York harbor and then from memory sketch the entire harbor. In fact, if you want to see it go to JFK Airport in New York City and you will see it as you enter the international terminal.
So what is it about these people? Well, first of all a lot of them had injuries to the left temporal lobe. One individual had a bullet as a child go right through the left temporal lobe. Another person dived into a swimming pool and injured very badly the left temporal lobe. And these people wound up with incredible mathematical abilities as a consequence.
And so what is it about their brains? Well Einstein's brain has actually been preserved. Einstein when he died had an autopsy in which case the pathologist stole the brain without permission of the family. He just realized that he was sitting next to something historic, took the brain, took it home with him and it was sitting in a jar in his home for decades. He even drove across the country with the jar inside his trunk.
And there's even a TV special where you can actually see the cut up brain of Albert Einstein. And you realize first of all the brain is a little bit different. You can't tell by looking at it that it's so remarkably different but you realize that the connections between the prefontal cortex and the parietal lobe -- a connection that is accentuated in people that do abstract reasoning is thickened. So there definitely is a difference in the brain of Einstein. But the question is did it make Einstein or did Einstein make this change of the brain? Are champions born or are they made? That still is not known because people who exercise mental abilities, mathematical abilities, they can thicken that part of the brain themselves.
So we know that people who do well in mathematics brain scans clearly show that their brains are slightly different from the average brain. So in conclusion, we're still children with regards to understanding how this process takes place. Tonight don't go home and bang yourself on the left temporal lobe. We don't know how it works. We just know that in a tiny fraction of these cases people with injury to the left temporal lobe, some of the become super geniuses.

Michio Kaku on Reading Minds, Recording Dreams, and Brain Imaging

Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studios to discuss his latest book, The Future of the Mind (http://goo.gl/1mcGeb). Here he explains the remarkable advances in brain imaging.
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Transcript -- When I was a child I was fascinated by telepathy in science fiction. In fact, I tried really hard to read other peoples' minds, to project my thoughts into other peoples' heads. And I came to the conclusion that maybe telepaths do walk the surface of the earth but I wasn't one of them. Now I'm a physicist and I realize that with all the electromagnetic probes that we have of the human brain we can actually see thoughts ricocheting across the brain itself. We can see the thinking living brain as it thinks and we can create computer simulations of this to understand what people are thinking. So at the present time telepathy exists. For example, look at my colleague Stephen Hawking. He's lost control of his fingers now so he cannot communicate even with a laptop computer. But look at his right frame of his glasses.
There's an EEG sensor that picks up radio waves from his brain, decodes that and he's allowed to manipulate to some degree a laptop computer. You can do better by putting a chip directly on top of the brain. People who are totally paralyzed, who are vegetables and they're trapped in this shell of a lifeless body -- these people can now play videogames. They can read email, write email, do crossword puzzles. They can operate their wheelchair. They can control household appliances. They can control mechanical arms. Next they will control mechanical legs and exoskeletons. In fact, one of the people that pioneers this technology for the next World Soccer Cup wants to have a paralyzed person put on an exoskeleton and initiate the soccer games. That's a goal for one of the scientists that I've interviewed for my book.
And so we're way past simply understanding the way in which the brain radiates radio. We're at the point now where we can actually interface the human brain with a computer and eventually with an exoskeleton by which they can become Iron Man. And so Iron Man is not simply a question of science fiction. It's something that we can actually visualize in the laboratory.
In addition to putting a chip on top of the brain you can actually put sensors directly into the brain itself that are like hair-like thin fibers. There's a certain class of people with depression that have been resistant to drugs, pharmacology, psychiatry, counseling. They are chronically depressed. It turns out that when you put a brain scan -- put them in a brain scan you find out that yes indeed there's a certain part of the brain that seems to be associated with this depression. By putting in probes you can dampen the electrical activity of this and all of a sudden they're cured. On one hand you see somebody who's chronically depressed, wants to commit suicide, has been plagued by this. And afterwards they're just cured. It's remarkable. But this is just another of the ways that we can access the human mind. Another way is through probes in an operation on epileptics. Epileptics have many seizures -- many of them are life threatening. It's possible to remove part of the cranium. These people are fully awake during this process because the skull has no sense organs to sense pain.
You put a bunch of electrodes directly on the brain itself. These people can type. These people can type very quickly simply by thinking about it. They think about a certain letter, a computer recognizes the pattern and a computer will type in this way. Yet another way of probing into the brain itself is with an MRI scan. We can take the living brain, put it in an MRI and get 30,000 dots like a Christmas tree set of lights that code the amount of electrical activity. You take these 30,000 dots, put it into a computer program that can then decipher it and bingo, what you get is a picture of what they are thinking. We can now visualize what somebody is thinking about. In fact it's on the web. There's a picture of Steve Martin, for example, in one of his movies and then right next to it is a picture as viewed through the human mind. This is amazing.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton

Michio Kaku: Are Robonauts Better Than Astronauts?

Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studios to discuss his latest book, The Future of the Mind (http://goo.gl/1mcGeb). Here he discusses the possibility of "surrogate" robotic astronauts.
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Transcript -- When you saw the movie Surrogates you said, "Well, that's science fiction" when Bruce Willis has a mechanical robot who is perfect. Absolutely perfect. Handsome with superpowers and you put your consciousness into the robot. So you go into a pod. Your body ages. Your body is strapped to a pod but you mentally control an avatar, a surrogate who has superpowers, perfectly formed and has all your abilities. This sounds like science fiction, right? Or the movie Avatar where again you're put inside a pod and you control an alien being on another planet breathing poisonous air. Is that possible? The answer is definitely yes. In Japan scientists at Honda Corporation have made a robot called ASIMO. It's one of the most advanced robots ever made.
ASIMO, the size of a young boy, can run, walk, climb up stairs and even dance. In fact he dances better than me. I've been on science specials with him and he out dances me every time. Honda Corporation has now taken a worker, put on an EEG helmet and have him control the robot. So it's now possible that you can have a surrogate. This could be the future of the space program. Why is outer space not opened up for tourists? Because of a dirty four letter word that begins with C -- cost. It costs ten thousand dollars to put a pound of anything in near Earth orbit. That is your weight in gold. Think of your body made out of solid gold. That's what it costs to put you in near Earth orbit. To put you on the moon costs about a hundred thousand dollars a pound. And to put you on Mars is about a million dollars a pound. So you're talking about your weight in diamonds to go to the planet Mars.
Why not put a surrogate? Because it's life support. Life support that makes things so expensive in outer space. You see, robots don't have to breathe. They don't have to eat. They don't bellyache. And most important, they don't have to come back. So why not put surrogates on Mars, surrogates on the Moon and you the astronaut can just take a breather and go into your living room and mentally communicate with a robot on the Moon. This would be by far the cheapest way to have a permanent Moon base and that would be, to you the astronaut, communicating with a surrogate by radio.
Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton

Michio Kaku on the Evolution of Intelligence

Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studios to discuss his latest book, The Future of the Mind (http://goo.gl/1mcGeb). Here he explains the evolution of human intelligence.
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Transcipt - Some people think that intelligence is the crowning achievement of evolution. Well if that's true there should be more intelligent creatures on the planet Earth. But to the best of our knowledge we're the only ones. The dinosaurs were on the Earth for roughly 200 million years and to the best of our knowledge not a single dinosaur became intelligent. We humans, modern humans, had been on the Earth for roughly a hundred thousand years. Only a tiny fraction of the 4.5 billion years that the Earth has been around. So you come to the rather astounding conclusion that intelligence is not really necessary. That Mother Nature has done perfectly well with non-intelligent creatures for millions of years and that we as intelligent creatures are the new kid on the block.
And so then you begin to wonder how did we become intelligent? What separated us from the animals? Well there are basically three ingredients -- at least three that help to propel us to become intelligent. One is the opposable thumb. You need a tentacle, a claw, an opposable thumb in order to manipulate the environment. So that's one of the ingredients of intelligence -- to be able to change the world around you.
Second is eyesight. But the eyesight of a predator. We have eyes to the front of our face, not to the side of our face and why? Animals with eyes to the front of their face are predators -- lions, tigers and foxes. Animals with eyes to the side of their face are prey and they are not as intelligent -- like a rabbit. We say dumb bunny and smart as a fox. And there's a reason for that. Because the fox is a predator. It has to learn how to ambush. It has to learn how to have stealth, camouflage. It has to psych out the enemy and anticipate the motion of the enemy that is its prey. If you're a dumb bunny all you have to do is run. And the third basic ingredient is language because you have to be able to communicate your knowledge to the next generation.
And to the best of our knowledge animals do not communicate knowledge to their offspring other than by simply communicating certain primitive motions. There's no book. There's no language. There's no culture by which animals can communicate their knowledge to the next generation. And so we think that's how the brain evolved. We have an opposable thumb, we have a language of maybe five to ten thousand words. And we have eyesight that is stereo eyesight -- the eyesight of a predator. And predators seem to be smarter than prey. Then you ask another question. How many animals on the Earth satisfy these three basic ingredients. And then you come to the astounding conclusion -- the answer is almost none. So perhaps there's a reason why we became intelligent and the other animals did not. They did not have the basic ingredients that would one day propel us to become intelligent.
Then the next question asked in Planet of the Apes and asked in any number of science fiction movies is can you accentuate intelligence. Can you take an ape and make the ape intelligent. Well, believe it or not the answer could be yes. We are 98.5 percent genetically equivalent to a chimpanzee. Only a handful of genes separate us from the chimps and yet we live twice as long and we have thousands of words in our vocabulary. Chimps can have maybe just a few hundred. And we've isolated many of those genes that separate us from the chimpanzees. For example the ASP gene governs the size of the crane, cranial capacity so that by monkeying with just one gene you can literally double the size of the brain case and the brain itself.
And so in the future -- not today but in the future we may use gene therapy to begin the process of making perhaps a chimpanzee intelligent. We know the genes that'll increase the size of the brain. We've isolated now the genes that give you manual dexterity by which you can make tools. We have found the genes which give you the ability to articulate thousands of words. And so it may be possible to tinker with the genome of a chimpanzee so that they have a larger brain case, they have better manual dexterity and they have the ability to articulate a larger vocabulary. But then what do you get? You get a primate that looks very similar to a human. And so my personal attitude is why bother. We already have humans, just look outside the door.
So why bother to manipulate a chimpanzee because as you make a chimpanzee more and more intelligent it becomes more and more humanlike with a vocabulary, with vocal chords, with manual dexterity, with a larger brain case and a spine to support a larger brain case. That's called a human.
Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton

Michio Kaku on Alien Brains

Michio Kaku on why Hollywood needs to make better aliens.
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Transcript:
I love to watch science fiction movies but I cringe – I cringe whenever I see a depiction of the aliens. First of all the aliens speak perfect English. Not just British English. They speak perfect American English. And obviously they’re a human inside some kind of monkey suit. I mean we have Hollywood special effects, right. So why can’t we get better aliens. And then the aliens think just like us. They’re territorial. They want to conquer. They want resources. They want – they see humans as inferior. But you see, that’s only a byproduct of our evolution. Look at other animals in the animal kingdom. Some animals are not territorial, okay. They don’t have to conquer. We have other paradigms in the animal kingdom which are totally different form the way our brain is constructed. But when we look at aliens in the movies we’re basically projecting our own consciousness in aliens. Our fears, our desires are projected and they are a mirror of who we are, not a mirror of who they really are.
For example, if we take a look at a bat or a dog, the dog’s brain is mainly interested in smells. It’s swirling in a universe of smells while a bat’s brain mainly is concentrated on sonar, on detecting clicks and echoes. Same thing with the dolphin brain. Their consciousness is totally different from our consciousness because they see things differently than us because of their evolutionary history. For example when we see a cat and the cat comes up to us and tries to purr next to us, we say to ourselves, “Oh, nice cat. The cat is being affectionate.” No. The cat is not being affectionate. It’s simply rubbing his hormones on you and saying, “I own this human. This human is mine. I’m marking my territory. This human feeds me twice a day. I’ve trained him.”
So a cat sees the universe totally different than we do and yet we impose our thinking on an alien. Now on the question of intelligence. If these aliens are more intelligent than us, how would they be more intelligent? In the book I say that one of the main ingredients of intelligence is to predict the future. The ability to simulate today so we see tomorrow. And that requires a high level of intelligence to be able to understand the laws of nature, the laws of people. What is the most likely outcome of a future event. That requires intelligence. If they are more intelligent than us they will see the future much better than us. They will see outcomes that we cannot foresee. They will simulate scenarios that we cannot even dream of. They can outwit us every time.
Think of a safecracker. A safecracker may have a low IQ, may have dropped out of elementary school. But the safecracker can simulate the future much better than a cop can and that’s why he can rob banks and get away with it. And so in other words, the criminal mind is not necessarily stupid because it has low IQ. It’s quite well adapted for what it does. And what it does is to simulate the future of a crime. Now think about when we encounter intelligent life that is more intelligent than us. They may see the world totally differently. Their world may be a world of smells, a world of sounds rather than a world of eyesight like our brain is constructed. And most important, they may be able to see the outcome of future events much better than us. They’ll be able to actually run circles around us because they see the future.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton

Michio Kaku - Can you build a real Lightsaber ?

Dr. Michio Kaku attempts to build a real Lightsaber from the Star Wars universe using modern technology

Michio Kaku: Consciousness Can be Quantified

Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studios to discuss his latest book, The Future of the Mind. Here, he explains how the quantifying approach common in physics can be used to model consciousness.
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Transcript:
In the entire universe the two greatest scientific mysteries are first of all the origin of the universe itself. And second of all the origin of intelligence. Believe it or not, sitting on our shoulders is the most complex object that Mother Nature has created in the known universe. You have to go at least 24 trillion miles to the nearest star to find a planet that may have life and may have intelligence. And yet our brain only consumes about 20-30 watts of power and yet it performs calculations better than any large supercomputer. So it's a mystery. How is the brain wired up? And if we can figure that out what can we do with it to enhance our mental capabilities.
When you look at the brain and all the parts of the brain they don't seem to make any sense at all. The visual part of the brain is way in the back, for example. Why is the brain constructed the way it is? Is this nothing but an accident of evolution? Well one way to look at it is through evolution. That is, the back of the brain is a so-called reptilian brain. The most ancient primitive part of the brain that governs balance, territoriality, mating. And so the very back of the brain is also the kind of brain that you find in reptiles. Now when I was a child I would go to the science museum and look at the snakes sometimes and they would stare back at me. And I would wonder, "What are they thinking about?" Well, I think now I know. What they're thinking about was, "Is this person lunch?"
Then we have the center part of the brain going forward and that's a so-called monkey brain, the mammalian brain. The brain of emotions. The brain of social hierarchies. And then finally the front of the brain is the human brain, especially the prefrontal cortex. This is where rational thinking is. And when you ask yourself a question where am I anyway. The answer is right behind your forehead. That's where you really are.
Well, I have a theory of consciousness which tries to wrap it all up together. There've been about 20,000 or so papers written about consciousness and no consensus. Never in the history of science have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little. Well, I'm a physicist and when we physicists look at a mysterious object the first thing we try to do is to create a model. A model of this object in space. And then we hit the play button and run it forward in time. This is how Newton was able to come up with the theory of gravity. This is how Einstein came up with relativity. So I tried to use this in terms of the human brain and evolution. So what I'm saying is I have a new theory of consciousness based on evolution. And that is consciousness is the number of feedback loops required to create a model of your position in space with relationship to other organisms and finally in relationship to time.
So think of the consciousness of a thermostat. I believe that even a lowly thermostat has one unit of consciousness. That is, it senses the temperature around it. And then we have a flower. A flower has maybe, maybe ten units of consciousness. It has to understand the temperature, the weather, humidity, where gravity is pointing. And then finally we go to the reptilian brain which I call level 1 consciousness and reptiles basically have a very good understanding of their position in space, especially because they have to lunge out and grab prey. Then we have level 2 consciousness, the monkey consciousness. The consciousness of emotions, social hierarchies, where are we in relationship to the tribe. And then where are we as humans.
As humans we are at level 3. We run simulations into the future. Animals apparently don't do this. They don't plan to hibernate. They don't plan the next day's agenda. They have no conception of tomorrow to the best of our ability. But that's what our brain does. Our brain is a prediction machine. And so when we look at the evolution from the reptilian brain to the mammalian brain to the prefrontal cortex, we realize that is the process of understanding our position in space with respect to others -- that is emotions -- and finally running simulations into the future.

Michio Kaku: This is Your Brain on a Laser Beam

Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studios to discuss his latest book, The Future of the Mind (http://goo.gl/1mcGeb). Here he explains how we might transfer our consciousness to laser beams to explore the universe at the speed of light. 😮
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Transcript -- Isaac Asimov was my favorite science fiction writer and his favorite science fiction story talked about an era far in the future when our bodies would be in pods and we would mentally control beings, beings of pure energy that would go flying around the universe. And, of course, it was science fiction but here's the idea. Mind without body. Pure consciousness roaming across the universe faster than any rocket ship. It turns out that that's actually a physical possibility. First of all the Obama administration and the European Union are pushing the Brain Project to delineate all the pathways of the human brain. This means that one day we might have a CD ROM called Brain 2.0. That is every single neuron encoded on a memory disc, your personality, your memories, who you are, the essence of your soul would be incorporated in this disc as pure information. Even if you die your consciousness, in some sense, may live on.
Now you as an organic being will have died. That means that your neurons will turn to dust. But the configuration of neurons that made your thinking process possible can be put on a disc in which case, in some sense you become immortal. Not only immortal but this could be the most efficient way to explore the galaxy just like Isaac Asimov predicted in his short story. Let's say I take your -- not your genome but your connectome, put it on a laser beam -- in fact in the book I actually calculate how big a laser beam will be required to put your consciousness as pure photons -- shine it into the heavens. You're now shooting consciousness into outer space at the speed of light. Forget booster rockets. Forget asteroid collisions. Forget radiation dangers and weightlessness and lack of oxygen. Forget all that. You are riding on a laser beam at the speed of light and then at the end there's a relay station.
A relay station which takes the laser beam and then puts into a surrogate. That is all the neural networks encoded into laser beam can be manifested as a robot on the other side of the galaxy. So in other words, it's like staying at a hotel. If you're a businessman you go from hotel to hotel and relax. The same way you'd be on a laser beam going from relay station to relay station and when you go to the relay station you take the robot body of a super human. You become superman on the other end of the rainbow. So is this a physical possibility? Yes. When might we have it? Well let's be honest. It would take perhaps a hundred years or so before we have a complete understanding of the connectome that is all the neuropathways of the brain. Perhaps another century beyond that before we have relay stations on which we could then shoot our consciousness into outer space. Is it mathematically and physically possible and the answer is yes.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Dillon Fitton

Michio Kaku Aliens Exist!! Contact with ETs Imminent!!

George Norry and Machi Kaku. What Christians don't know about Reality. Science is getting close.

Michio Kaku (born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York, a futurist, and a communicator and popularizer of science. More Michio Kaku: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&tag=tra0c7-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=9192501452ffbd143985389dbbdd7376&camp=1789&creative=9325&index=books&keywords=michio%20kaku
He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film; and he writes extensive online blogs and articles. He has written two New York Times Best Sellers, Physics of the Impossible (2008) and Physics of the Future (2011).
Kaku has hosted several TV specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.
Kaku has appeared in many forms of media and on many programs and networks, including Good Morning America, The Screen Savers, Larry King Live, 60 Minutes, Imus In The Morning, Nightline, 20/20, Naked Science, CNN, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Al Jazeera English, Fox News Channel, The History Channel, Conan, The Science Channel, The Discovery Channel, TLC, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Colbert Report, The Art Bell Show and its successor, Coast To Coast AM, BBC World News America, The Covino & Rich Show, Head Rush, Late Show with David Letterman, and Real Time with Bill Maher. Kaku was interviewed for two PBS documentaries produced and directed by Rosemarie Reed, a former colleague of his at WBAI Radio, The Path to Nuclear Fission: The Story of Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn[14] and Out from the Shadows: The Story of Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie.[15]
We Are the Guinea Pigs (1980)
Borders (1989)
Synthetic Pleasures (1995)
Einstein Revealed (1996)
Future Fantastic (1996)
Stephen Hawking's Universe (1997)
Bioperfection: Building a New Human Race (1998)
Exodus Earth (1999)
Me & Isaac Newton (1999)
Space: The Final Junkyard (1999)
Ghosts: Caught on Tape (2000)
Big Questions (2001)
Parallel Universes (2001)
Horizon: "Time travel" (2003)
Robo sapiens (2003)
Brilliant Minds: Secret Of The Cosmos (2003)
Nova: "The Elegant Universe" (2003)
Hawking (2004)
The Screen Savers (2004)
Unscrewed with Martin Sargent (2004)
Alien Planet (2005)
ABC News "UFOs: Seeing Is Believing" (2005)
HARDtalk Extra (2005)
Last Days on Earth (2005)
Obsessed & Scientific (2005)
Horizon: "Einstein's Unfinished Symphony" (2005)
Time (2006)
2057 (2007)
The Universe (2007)
Futurecar (2007)
Attack of the Show! (2007)
Visions of the Future (2008)
Horizon: "The President's Guide to Science" (2008)
Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (2008)
Horizon: "Who's Afraid of a Big Black Hole" (2009--2010)
Sci Fi Science: Physics of the Impossible (2009--2010)
Horizon: "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2010)
GameTrailers TV With Geoff Keighley: "The Science of Games" (2010)
How the Universe Works (2010)
Seeing Black Holes (2010)
Prophets of Science Fiction (2011)
Through the Wormhole (2011)
Horizon: "What Happened Before the Big Bang?" (2011)
The Science of Doctor Who (2012)
World War Z: (2013)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michio_kaku
Image By Campus Party Brasil (Flickr: Michio Kaku) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists Confirm Higgs Boson Discovery - Michio Kaku

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider say the particle outlined in July 2012 looks increasingly to be a Higgs Boson (God Particle). - Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics explains.

Michio Kaku: Space Bubble Baths and the Free Universe

How can you create a universe from nothing? Well if you calculate the total matter of the universe it is positive. If you calculate the total energy of the universe it is negative because of gravity. Gravity has negative energy. When you add the two together what do you get? Zero, so it takes no energy to create a universe. Universes are for free. A universe is a free lunch.
Michio Kaku -- We have found the Higgs boson. So then the next question is what's next? Well the Large Hadron Collider, this machine that is 27 miles in circumference, costing 10 billion dollars is big enough to create the next generation of particles. So the Higgs boson in some sense is the last hurrah for the old physics, the old physics of what is called the standard model, which gives us quarks and electrons. The new theory is going to take us into dark matter. Now we know dark matter exists. Dark matter is invisible, so if I held it in my hand you wouldn't see it. In fact, it would go right through my fingers, go right through the rock underneath my feet and go all the way to China. It would reverse direction and come back from China all the way here to New York City and go back and forth.
So dark matter has gravitational attraction, but it is invisible and we are clueless as to what dark matter really is. The leading candidate for dark matter today is called the sparticle. The sparticle is the next octave of the string. Now look around you. Everything around you, we think, is nothing but the lowest vibration of a vibrating string, the lowest octave in some sense, but a string of course has higher octaves, higher notes. We think that dark matter could in fact be nothing but a higher vibration of the string. So we think that 23% of the universe, which is the dark matter's contribution to the universe, comes from a higher octave of the string. Now the standard model which we have ample verification of only represents four percent of the universe. So the universe of atoms, protons, neutrons, neutrinos - that universe only represents four percent of what there is. 23% is dark matter, which we think is the next vibration up of the string and then 73% of the universe is dark energy.
Dark energy is the energy of nothing. It's the energy of the vacuum. Between two objects in outer space there is nothing, nothing except dark energy, dark energy, which is pushing the galaxies apart. So when people say if the universe is expanding they say two things, what's pushing the galaxies apart and what is the universe expanding into. Well what's pushing the galaxies apart is dark energy, the energy of nothing. Even vacuum has energy pushing the galaxies apart. And then what is the universe expanding into? Well if the universe is a sphere of some sort and we live on the skin of the sphere and the sphere is expanding what is the sphere expanding into? Well obviously a bubble, a balloon expands into the third dimension even though the people living on the balloon are two dimensional.
So when our universe expands what does it expand into? Hyperspace, a dimension beyond what you can see and touch. In fact, string theory predicts that there are 11 dimensions of hyperspace, so we're nothing but a soap bubble floating in a bubble bath of soap bubbles and so in some sense the multiverse can be likened to a bubble bath. Our universe is nothing but one bubble, but there are other bubbles. When two bubbles collide that could merge into a bigger bubble, which could be the big bang. In fact, that is what probably the big bang is or perhaps a bubble fissioned in half and split off into two bubbles. That could be the big bang. Or perhaps the universe popped into existence out of nothing. That is also a possibility.
And so the universe could essentially be nothingness, which was unstable and created a soap bubble Now you may say to yourself well that can't be right because that violates the conservation of matter and energy. How can you create a universe from nothing? Remainder of transcript - http://bigthink.com/ideas/49273
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

Michio Kaku: Is God a Mathematician?

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Michio Kaku says that God could be a mathematician: "The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God."
Transcript--
Some people ask the question "Of what good is math?" What is the relationship between math and physics? Well, sometimes math leads. Sometimes physics leads. Sometimes they come together because, of course, there's a use for the mathematics. For example, in the 1600s Isaac Newton asked a simple question: if an apple falls then does the moon also fall? That is perhaps one of the greatest questions ever asked by a member of Homo sapiens since the six million years since we parted ways with the apes. If an apple falls, does the moon also fall?
Isaac Newton said yes, the moon falls because of the Inverse Square Law. So does an apple. He had a unified theory of the heavens, but he didn't have the mathematics to solve the falling moon problem. So what did he do? He invented calculus. So calculus is a direct consequence of solving the falling moon problem. In fact, when you learn calculus for the first time, what is the first thing you do? The first thing you do with calculus is you calculate the motion of falling bodies, which is exactly how Newton calculated the falling moon, which opened up celestial mechanics.
So here is a situation where math and physics were almost conjoined like Siamese twins, born together for a very practical question, how do you calculate the motion of celestial bodies? Then here comes Einstein asking a different question and that is, what is the nature and origin of gravity? Einstein said that gravity is nothing but the byproduct of curved space. So why am I sitting in this chair? A normal person would say I'm sitting in this chair because gravity pulls me to the ground, but Einstein said no, no, no, there is no such thing as gravitational pull; the earth has curved the space over my head and around my body, so space is pushing me into my chair. So to summarize Einstein's theory, gravity does not pull; space pushes. But, you see, the pushing of the fabric of space and time requires differential calculus. That is the language of curved surfaces, differential calculus, which you learn in fourth year calculus.
So again, here is a situation where math and physics were very closely combined, but this time math came first. The theory of curved surfaces came first. Einstein took that theory of curved surfaces and then imported it into physics.
Now we have string theory. It turns out that 100 years ago math and physics parted ways. In fact, when Einstein proposed special relativity in 1905, that was also around the time of the birth of topology, the topology of hyper-dimensional objects, spheres in 10, 11, 12, 26, whatever dimension you want, so physics and mathematics parted ways. Math went into hyperspace and mathematicians said to themselves, aha, finally we have found an area of mathematics that has no physical application whatsoever. Mathematicians pride themselves on being useless. They love being useless. It's a badge of courage being useless, and they said the most useless thing of all is a theory of differential topology and higher dimensions.
Well, physics plotted along for many decades. We worked out atomic bombs. We worked out stars. We worked out laser beams, but recently we discovered string theory, and string theory exists in 10 and 11 dimensional hyperspace. Not only that, but these dimensions are super. They're super symmetric. A new kind of numbers that mathematicians never talked about evolved within string theory. That's how we call it "super string theory." Well, the mathematicians were floored. They were shocked because all of a sudden out of physics came new mathematics, super numbers, super topology, super differential geometry.
All of a sudden we had super symmetric theories coming out of physics that then revolutionized mathematics, and so the goal of physics we believe is to find an equation perhaps no more than one inch long which will allow us to unify all the forces of nature and allow us to read the mind of God. And what is the key to that one inch equation? Super symmetry, a symmetry that comes out of physics, not mathematics, and has shocked the world of mathematics. But you see, all this is pure mathematics and so the final resolution could be that God is a mathematician. And when you read the mind of God, we actually have a candidate for the mind of God. The mind of God we believe is cosmic music, the music of strings resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace. That is the mind of God.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

Michio Kaku: What's the Fate of the Universe? It's in the Dark Matter

Why should you bother to wake up tomorrow knowing that we're all going to die billions and billions of years from now when the universe turns to absolute zero, when the stars blink out, when we have nothing but neutron stars and black holes? Dr. Kaku says that billions of years from now we may be able to move to a different universe.
Transcript -- In cosmology we believe that the universe started off in a big bang 13.7 billion years ago. All alternatives have been pretty much ruled out. Steady state theories, other alternatives have been ruled out. However, how will the universe end? We have several possibilities. One possibility is a big crunch when the universe squashes together in a gigantic ball of flame and maybe bangs once again. Another possibility is the big freeze, that the universe expands and just keeps on going and we're all going to freeze to death and we're all going to die when the universe reaches near absolute zero. Then there is something called the big rip where the universe goes into an exponential expansion and expands so rapidly that the distant galaxies can no longer be seen because they travel faster than the speed of light, that even the distant galaxies break the light barrier, and that's called the big rip, meaning that the night sky will be totally black except for some of the nearby stars.
Which of the three alternatives is the fate of the universe? Well, the short answer is we don't know. However, what we do know is that the universe is undergoing an exponential runaway expansion. The universe at the present time is careening out of control. Every astronomy textbook says that there was a big bang. The universe is expanding, but it's slowing down. It also says that the universe is mainly made out of atoms. Every textbook says that. The universe is made out of atoms. The universe is expanding, but slowing down. Both are wrong. We have to rewrite every single high school textbook on the planet earth. The universe is not mainly made out of atoms.
Four percent of the universe is made out of atoms, just four percent. 23% is made out of dark matter. 73%, which makes up most of the universe, is dark energy, and unfortunately, we are clueless as to what dark energy is and what dark matter is. In fact, if you ever find out what dark energy and dark matter is, be sure to tell me first.
Now why is that important? Because the amount of matter and energy in the universe determines the rate of expansion. We now know there is a lot more dark energy than we previously thought. Therefore, the universe is undergoing an inflationary exponential expansion. It is in a runaway mode, but here is the catch: we don't know how long that runaway mode is going to last. Some people say that it's temporary. We're in this huge expansion right now, exponential expansion, but it's going to reverse itself. Instead of a red shift, we'll have a blue shift as the universe collapses. At the present time we simply don't know. Why don't we know? Because we don't know what dark energy is. In fact, if you were to try to write down a theory of dark energy, your number would not correspond to the data by a mismatch of 10 to the 120. That is the largest mismatch in the history of science. There is no mismatch bigger than 10 to the 120. So this is a mystery. Until we solve the mystery of dark energy, we do not know the ultimate fate of the universe.
My personal thoughts are that perhaps we will continue with this exponential expansion and perhaps go into a big rip mode and at that point all intelligent life in the universe will die. All the tears and all the struggles and all the heartbreak of humanity since we rose from the swamp, it's all for nothing. Why should you bother to wake up tomorrow knowing that we're all going to die billions and billions of years from now when the universe turns to absolute zero, when the stars blink out, when we have nothing but neutron stars and black holes? What does it all mean anyway, if we're all going to die in a big rip?
Well, my personal attitude is that when the universe is about to die, why not leave the universe? Trillions of years from now, we will have the ability to bend space and time into a pretzel. We'll be able to tie space into knots. We'll be what is called a type three, maybe a type four civilization, a galactic civilization with the capability of harnessing galactic power. At that point, when the universe becomes so cold that all life is freezing to death, I say let us escape the universe, go into hyperspace and go to another universe.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

Michio Kaku: Can Nanotechnology Create Utopia?

Dr. Kaku addresses the question of the possibility of utopia, the perfect society that people have tried to create throughout history. These dreams have not been realized because we have scarcity. However, now we have nanotechnology, and with nanotechnology, perhaps, says Dr. Michio Kaku, maybe in 100 years, we'll have something called the replicator, which will create enormous abundance.
Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/can-nanotechnology-create-utopia
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Transcript:
Throughout human history people have tried to create utopia, the perfect society. In fact, America, the American dream, in some sense was based on utopianism. Why do we have the Shaker movement? Why did we have the Quakers? Why did we have so many different kinds of religious movements that fled Europe looking to create a utopia here in the Americas? Well, we know the Shakers have disappeared and many of these colonies have also disappeared only to be found in footnotes in American textbooks, and the question is why?
One reason why is scarcity because back then the industrial revolution was still young and societies had scarcity. Scarcity creates conflict and unless you have a way to resolve conflict, your colony falls apart. How do you allocate resources? Who gets access to food when there is a famine? Who gets shelter when there is a snowstorm and all of the sudden you've eaten up your seed corn? These are questions that faced the early American colonists, and that's the reason why we only see the ghost towns of these utopias.
However, now we have nanotechnology, and with nanotechnology, perhaps, who knows, maybe in 100 years, we'll have something called the replicator. Now the replicator is something you see in Star Trek. It's called the molecular assembler and it takes ordinary raw materials, breaks them up at the atomic level and joins the joints in different ways to create new substances. If you have a molecular assembler, you can turn, for example, a glass into wood or vice versa. You would have the power of a magician, in fact, the power of a god, the ability to literally transform the atoms of one substance into another and we see it on Star Trek.
It's also the most subversive device of all because if utopias fail because of scarcity then what happens when you have infinite abundance? What happens when you simply ask and it comes to you? One of my favorite episodes on Star Trek is when the Enterprise encounters a space capsule left over from the 20th century, the bad 20th century. People died of all these horrible diseases, and many people froze themselves knowing that in the 23rd century or so they'll be thawed out and their diseases will be cured. Well, sure enough, it's the 23rd century now. The Enterprise finds a space capsule and begins to revive all these people and cure them of cancer, cure them of incurable genetic diseases, and then one of these individuals, however, was a banker. He is revived and he says to himself, "My God, my gamble worked; I'm alive; I'm in the 23rd century," and he said, "Call my stock broker; call my banker; I am rich; I am rich; my investments, they have been sitting there in the bank for centuries; I must be a quadrillionaire!" And then the crew of the Enterprise looks at this man and says, "What is money; what is a bank; what is a stock broker? We don't have any of these in the 23rd century," and then they say, "If you want something, you simply ask for it and you get it."
Now that's subversive. That's revolutionary because if all utopian societies vanished because of scarcity and conflict, what happens when there is no scarcity? What happens when you simply ask and you get what you want? This has enormous philosophical implications. For example, why bother to work? Why bother to go to work when you simply ask for things and it comes to you?

Michio Kaku: The von Neumann Probe (A Nano Ship to the Stars)

One of the inventions that may be realized by advances in nanotechnology is the creation of a von Neumann probe, which is essentially a virus, a self-replicating probe that can then explore the universe near the speed of light.
Transcript--
Recently there was a conference, the One Hundred Year Starship, and of course many people came in with designs to have gigantic fusion rockets take us to Mars and beyond Jupiter, into the stars. Other people said yes, antimatter rockets, that's the way to go, and we all had this mental vision of the Enterprise going to the nearby star systems. . . . There is another way to do it. Think of Mother Nature. When Mother Nature wants to propagate life, one possibility is to send out seeds, not just one or two, but millions of seeds. Most of the seeds never make it, but one or two do and as a consequence that's how trees in forests propagate. So why not create a nano ship using nanotechnology? How big would it be? Some people like Paul Davies say it could be as big as a bread box. Other people say it could be even smaller than that. Why not something the size of a needle? And because they're so small it wouldn't take much to accelerate them to near the speed of light.
Realize that a very small tabletop accelerator can accelerate electrons to near the speed of light, so it wouldn't take much for us to accelerate nano molecules to very, very fast velocities near the speed of light using electric fields. Now these probes would be different from ordinary probes. They would be nanobots. They would have the ability to land on a hostile terrain and create a factory just like a virus. That's what viruses do. They replicate. One virus can create maybe a thousand copies, then a thousand, thousand copies and then a million, billion, trillion and all of the sudden you have trillions of these things propagating through outer space. And how would you do it? One possibility is to use the field, magnetic fields around Jupiter. Calculations have shown that you can whip around Jupiter using what is called the Faraday Effect to whip particles to perhaps near the speed of light.
And again, we don't have these nanobots yet. We have to wait until nanotechnology becomes sufficiently developed, but when that happens perhaps the 100 year starship is not going to look like the Enterprise. Perhaps it will look like tiny, little needles by the billions sent into outer space and maybe only a handful of them land on a distant moon to create factories. And doesn't that sound familiar? This is the plotline of the movie 2001. Remember that gigantic obelisk on Mars? That was the von Neumann probe, a virus, a self-replicating probe that can then explore the universe near the speed of light.
Directed / Produced by
Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

Can We Have Brain-to-Brain Communication?

Michio Kaku says this brain-to-brain communication would involve not just the exchange of information, but also the transmission of emotions and feelings, "because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts."
Michio Kaku: There's no doubt that the internet is creating what is called an intelligent planet, that is, the skin of the planet earth is becoming a network by which intelligent creatures communicate with each other. But that's just the first step. Some people think that the next step in the coming decades is not going to be the internet. It's going to be Brain Net because we're at the point now where we can actually connect computers to the living mind. In fact, I was just at Berkeley a few weeks ago where I had a demonstration of this: we can actually create videos of your thoughts. These videos are not perfectly accurate, but I saw a demonstration in a laboratory at Berkeley where you can actually see in a video screen what people are thinking.So with electrodes, perhaps, or EEG sensors in a helmet connected to our brain, perhaps one day we'll be able to have brain-to-brain communication, and that gives us the possibility of Brain Net. In fact, some of the leading neurologists doing these experiments have seriously proposed a brain net whereby you would exchange not just information like typing, but also emotions, feelings, because these are also part of the fabric of our thoughts. And then what comes beyond that? Well, of course, beyond that is science fiction, and science fiction gives us all sorts of horror stories of things like Sky Net: maybe one day the internet will become sentient; maybe one day the internet will think that humans are in the way and perhaps the internet will take over just like in the Terminator series. Well, I don't think so.The internet is simply a way in which minds can communicate with other minds. We see no self-awareness in the internet. Now some people say,"Well, what about some kind of collective consciousness that arises by an emergent phenomenon?" Well, that's a lot of gobbledygook. That's a lot of nice words. Maybe. Maybe not. But it's pure speculation at the present time. Even in the laboratory with our finest instruments and the latest developments in artificial intelligence, we cannot make a computer become self-aware. You realize that one of our most advances computers was the IBM computer Watson, which defeated two humans on the program Jeopardy. At that point, many pundits said, "Oh my God, the end is near; the robots are going to put us in zoos; they're going to throw peanuts at us; make us dance behind bars when they take over, just like we make bears dance behind bars today." Well, just remember that Watson, no matter how fast it is, was so stupid you couldn't congratulate it. You can't go up to Watson, slap its transistors and say, "Good boy!. You just beat two humans on Jeopardy. You made history. Let's drink to it!" You see, Watson is an adding machine, a very sophisticated adding machine. It adds billions of times faster than the human brain, but that's all it is. It's what is called an expert system. It deals with formalized inputs, formalized outputs. You talk to an expert system every time you're on the telephone, and the telephone says, "Please hit button one; please hit number two for the next option." That's called an expert system. It's basically a sophisticated adding machine that sounds like it's thinking, but it's not. It's simply using a formalized logic. If you hit one, then you go there. If you hit two, you go someplace else. That's Watson -- of course on a very, very sophisticated level. So I personally think that we don't have to worry that that internet is going to become sentient.Directed / Produced byJonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

The Big Bang - Lawrence Krauss and Michio Kaku

Professor Lawrence Krauss and Professor Michio Kaku explain the physics behind the events in the first second of The Big Bang, events which range from the first fractions of a second after creation: The Plank Era; The field symmetry breaking; formation of elementary particles; Matter-antimatter annihilation (explained by Dr. Tara Shears); Formation of atoms and the last scattering of photons which make up the Cosmic Microwave Background (Explained by Dr. David N. Spergel) to the billions of years of stellar evolution: the formation of stars and Galaxies which developed the visible universe as seen today.
Using High Energy Particle Accelerators and Observational and Theoretical Astrophysics, scientists are able to recreate the first few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, to the point of symmetry breaking, and in conjunction by using space and earth-based observatories observe the remnants of the Big Bang itself using powerful analysis of the CMB by the WMAP and Planck Spacecraft combined with the modelling of the large scale structure of the universe as done by The Sloan Digital Sky Survey..
The Initial Conditions of the Universe are still a mystery and debate has gone on recently to whether or not there were even any initial conditions at all, maybe the universe can form from no initial conditions in standard space-time and that the very fabric of space, curled up in perhaps infinite dimensions creates an infinite set of paths for scalar fields to branch off of and interfere to create the flow of energy from the initial big bang.
Such a theory is predicted by M-Theory, which gives the Multiverse picture of curved Space-Time in 11 Dimensions which, through quantum mechanics, create many scalar fields that couple at different strengths in each universe creating a different set of physical laws in each universe.
Not all universes could be suitable for life, each universe seems to have the Planck Constant encoded into it, as it is the Uncertainty Principle and the Sum over Histories that lead to the Multiverse picture in the first place, however the coupling strengths of gravity and electromagnetism are completely arbitrary in this view.
In some of these Universes, Electromagnetism could be very strongly coupled in certain schemes meaning that basic chemistry would not arise in some universes. In other Universes the Strong Nuclear force may be too weak to give sufficient binding energy to atomic nuclei, making fusion impossible. In other Universes, Gravity may be coupled far more strongly, creating a Universe of Galaxy Cluster-sized black holes. Other Universes still may be composed of nothing but vacuum energy.
Hence we must be living in a Universe suitable for life as we are here observing it, that is the nature of The Anthropic Principle which is used to answer the question, "why is the universe the way it is?" However, the true meaning of the answer comes from Theoretical Physics and M-Theory: The Universe need not be suitable for life, our one just happens to be.

Michio Kaku: Can We Resurrect the Dinosaurs? Neanderthal Man?

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Dr. Kaku answers the question of whether it is possible to resurrect the dinosaurs by "turning on" their ancient genes? Moreover, now that we have also sequenced the genes of the Neanderthal man, at some point in the future it may be possible to bring him back. And then of course, if a young Neanderthal boy is born then the question is where do you put the boy, in a zoo or at Harvard?
Transcript--
Michio Kaku: We have taken cells from the carcass of an animal that died decades ago and brought them back to life and so it is possible using today's technology to take bodies, carcasses of animals that died decades ago and resurrect them in the form of clones. Now we have also sequenced the genes of the Neanderthal man, meaning that at some point in the future it may be possible to bring back the Neanderthal man. In fact, at Harvard University one professor even made a proposal as to how much it would cost to reassemble the genome of the Neanderthal man. And then of course, if a young Neanderthal boy is born then the question is where do you put the boy, in a zoo or at Harvard?
This is a question that we're going to be facing in the coming decades because it is possible that we might be able to bring back the mammoths. We're talking about creatures that walked the surface of the earth tens of thousands of years ago and we have their genome and it's a serious proposal now that we're closing in on sequencing all the genes of a mammoth to bring the mammoth - by inserting a fertilized egg inside the womb of an elephant and having an elephant give birth to a mammoth.
Now dinosaurs are much more difficult. They perished 65 million years ago, not tens of thousands of years ago. However, something has happened that I thought would not happen in my lifetime and that is we have soft tissue from the dinosaurs. I never thought it would be possible in my lifetime. If you take a hadrosaur and crack open the thigh bones, bingo. You find soft tissue right there in the bone marrow. Who would have thought? T-Rex's too and scientists have analyzed not the DNA, but the proteins inside the soft tissue. Not surprisingly, we find the proteins of chickens and also frogs and reptiles, which means of course that dinosaurs we can now show biochemically are very closely related to birds. In fact, we think birds are dinosaurs that survived the cataclysm of 65 million years ago.
Now there is another proposal to use what is called epigenetics. Nature does not simply throw away good genes. Nature simply turns them off. For example, we have the genes in our own body that would put hair all over our body and you can actually turn that gene and create, quote, unquote, a werewolf. In fact, in Mexico City there are two young boys with hair all over their bodies that are acrobats in a circus and scientists have sequenced the genes and yes, it is a very ancient gene that they have.
With chickens we can actually see the genes for chickens that were turned off because of epigenetics, genes that give webbing between the toes of a chicken because a long time ago chickens had webbed feet and also teeth. You can actually bring back teeth inside chickens. So then the question is, is it possible to make the next big leap to use epigenetics, to use gene therapy, to use all the different kinds of therapies we have, mix all these things up in the memory of a computer and have the computer give the best fit for a reptile that is like a dinosaur, insert that perhaps, into the womb of maybe an alligator or a whatever and perhaps give birth to an egg, which will hatch something resembling a dinosaur.
Well that's not possible today, but it's not out of the question. It's not out of the question that at some point in the future we'll use a computer to take all these bits of DNA from living lizards, from the—extracting information from the proteins of soft tissue from hadrosaurs and assemble the best mathematical approximation to a dinosaur and have it give birth to an egg.
Directed / Produced by Elizabeth Rodd and Jonathan Fowler

Prepare for Mass Extinction - Dr. Michio Kaku

Dr. Michio Kaku discusses possible mass extinction.

Michio Kaku: What Put the Bang in the Big Bang?

What is the Higgs boson? Michio Kaku describes the so-called "God particle" as a fuse. "It's a match. It's the spark that set off the Big Bang. It put the bang in the Big Bang."
Transcript--
A few months ago the headlines were dominated by the fact that physicists think they found the Higgs boson. Well, the media said, this is a great discovery, but what do you mean you think you found the Higgs boson? Well, to within five standard deviations, yes, we think we found the Higgs boson. And the media said, what do you mean by that?
Well I would have answered the question differently. I would have said, "With 99.9999% confidence, we have bagged the Higgs boson. If you are an odds maker in Las Vegas, and the bets are that you are 99.9999% confident that you have it, then yes, you have it."
So experimental data is not ironclad. You have a bell-shaped curve of information, a bell-shaped curve where the data indicates that you're sitting right here on the top of the bell-shaped curve, but as you go away from the bell-shaped curve, you undergo one standard deviation, two standard deviations, three standard deviations . . . and here we have five standard deviations of proof. So in physics we use that as the gold standard: if you can say you found something within five standard deviations, then it means that, within 99.9999% accuracy, you have actually found it. Most people would say, of course you have found it.
The Higgs boson is important not just because it gives particles mass. That's how the media played it, and people say, well, so what; ten billion dollars for another god darn subatomic particle that gives us mass; what's the big deal; why call it the God particle; why say that it's one of the great achievements of modern science? Well, you have to understand something: we physicists squirm when we hear "God particle," but, you see, there is some truth to the name "the God particle" because the Bible says that God set the universe into motion. That's what God did in Genesis, chapter one, verse one. However, we physicists say that the universe was created in a big bang 13.7 billion years ago. But then the question is, why did it bang? What set off the bang? We don't know. It's a big mystery. Well, the answer is a Higgs-like boson set off the Big Bang. It put the bang in the Big Bang.
See, the purpose of Higgs bosons—and there is more than one—the purpose of the Higgs boson is to break a symmetry. And when you break symmetries like the symmetry of the universe, then you get big bangs. So what is the Higgs boson? The Higgs boson is a fuse. It's a match. It's the spark that set off the Big Bang. It put the bang in the Big Bang.
Directed / Produced by
Elizabeth Rodd and Jonathan Fowler
http://bigthink.com/

Michio Kaku: The Search for Life on Mars

Where should NASA go to look for intelligent life on Mars? To get to the truth, journalists say follow the money. Astronomers say follow the water. Dr. Michio Kaku says "if you were a Martian on Mars three billion years ago when Mars was probably a lush environment with liquid water oceans—and you realized that the water was escaping to the icecaps, escaping into outer space or going into the permafrost," then you would "probably go either into outer space to leave Mars or drill into the permafrost or go into the polar icecaps. So I think that's what NASA is going to do next."
Originally recorded August 9, 2012.
Transcript--
Dr. Michio Kaku: Congratulations to NASA! NASA scored a gold medal on Mars, a ten. It was a perfect launch, perfect execution, and the dismount was a perfect ten on the Red Planet. But that's just the first step of many steps to come. Next we want to go to perhaps the polar icecaps or perhaps even drill underground.
If you were a Martian on Mars three billion years ago when Mars was practically a—probably a lush environment with liquid water oceans—and you realized that the water was escaping to the icecaps, escaping into outer space or going into the permafrost, where would you go? Journalists say follow the money. Astronomers say follow the water. And if the water is going to go into outer space, underground or the polar icecaps, you would also probably go either into outer space to leave Mars or drill into the permafrost or go into the polar icecaps. So I think that's what NASA is going to do next. Of course, it's more difficult to land on the polar icecaps because the terrain is quite rocky.
Also, rock retrieval; we need to actually take rocks from Mars and bring them back to earth because we have tantalizing evidence that possibly microbial life existed on Mars. We have Mars rocks right here on the planet earth, and when you slice them open you see little tiny, squiggly things that look like multi-celled organisms. Well, we're not sure. It's a raging debate. Some people say bah-humbug, it's nothing but a crystalline structure that seems to look like a multi-cell organism. The result of the question is we have to have rock retrieval and after that I think perhaps we should put a blimp or a helicopter on Mars. Now the atmosphere of Mars is quite thin, only one percent the atmospheric pressure here on the planet earth, so the wings of the helicopter or the size of a blimp would have to be different to compensate for that.
And then of course we should try for a manned mission to Mars. But let's be real. It's going to be expensive and it will take time. It costs $10,000 to put a pound of anything into near earth orbit. Imagine your body made out of solid gold and that's the cost to put you into orbit around the planet earth. To put you on the moon costs about $100,000 a pound. To put you on Mars costs about a million dollars a pound. So think twice before you think that we're going to go to Mars with astronauts in the next few years. It's going to take decades to prepare for a manned mission to Mars.
Directed / Produced by
Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
http://bigthink.com/

Michio Kaku's Must-See Videos: An Introduction to Infinity by TED-Ed

Launch Dr. Kaku's playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL101E166E120852F9
"Welcome to Big Think's YouTube channel. I'm Dr. Michio Kaku. I work in something called string theory, and I want to introduce you to the top five science videos that you cannot afford to miss. First up, have you ever wondered how big infinity is? Well the folks at TED-Ed have produced an animation that helps to explain the mysteries of infinity. Check it out!"

Michio Kaku: The Universe in a Nutshell (Full Presentation)

What if we could find one single equation that explains every force in the universe? Dr. Michio Kaku explores how physicists may shrink the science of the Big Bang into an equation as small as Einstein's "e=mc^2." Thanks to advances in string theory, physics may allow us to escape the heat death of the universe, explore the multiverse, and unlock the secrets of existence. While firing up our imaginations about the future, Kaku also presents a succinct history of physics and makes a compelling case for why physics is the key to pretty much everything.
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Kaku's latest book is The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind (http://goo.gl/kGrVaR).
The Universe in a Nutshell: The Physics of Everything
Michio Kaku, Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at CUNY
The Floating University
Originally released September, 2011.
Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Kathleen Russell, and Elizabeth Rodd

Michio Kaku: The Dark Side of Technology

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Dr. Michio Kaku addresses this question: What is the most dangerous technology?
Directed / Produced by
Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

Michio Kaku on the Solar Revolution

Michio Kaku: I believe in solar power, but there are problems that we have to face, and one of them is low efficiency.
Michio Kaku: Some people think that the time is right for the solar revolution, that one day solar power will replace oil and we'll all live in a world that is clean and renewable. Well, not so fast. I believe in solar power. However, there are problems that we have to face, and one of them is low efficiency. The other one is lack of a storage facility like a battery. That's' the weak link. We simply don't have the efficiency of solar cells necessary to make it economical and competitive today, and the ability to store the energy for long periods of time when the sun is dark, when there are clouds and your solar panels don't work.So my point of view is this: I think in the coming decade, as oil prices start to rise and as the cost of wind and solar and renewables start to drop, the two currents will probably cross in maybe ten years. So in ten years it will be the marketplace which then begins to drive the whole thing forward because of the dropping cost of solar cells and rising efficiency and the rising price of oil. Now, why do I believe that oil prices will rise? Because of something called Hubbert's Peak. Hubbert was a Shell Oil engineer way back in the 1960s who predicted that we would hit the halfway point for the production of oil in the United States and after that the bell-shaped curve would curve the other way and we would become an importer of oil. Well, people laughed at him because they said that, "Well, wait a minute. We have Alaska. We have Texas. We have lots of oil fields, and so we're not going to hit the 50% point. America will always export oil." Well, wrong. Hubbert hit it right on the nose to within the year at which US oil supplies peaked and then it went to the other side of the bell-shaped curve. That's called Hubbert's Peak, when we hit the 50% point. Now we know that Hubbard was right and the next big question is, are we hitting Hubbert's Peak for world oil production? That is the $64,000 question. Many people that I've talked to, senior oil analysts, energy analysts, say that we are either at Hubbert's Peak or within ten years of hitting Hubbert's Peak. Now some people say, "Well that's stupid. We discover new oil deposits all the time. Look at Canada. We have tar sands of Canada, right?" Wrong. It turns out that we will always have oil. We will never run out of oil, except oil will become more expensive as we go down the other side of Hubbert's Peak. We would have to discover a new Saudi Arabia every five to ten years in order for this curve to simply go on forever. That's not going to happen. I don't care how many tar sands you're talking about in Canada. You're not going to create a new Saudi Arabia, which produces very clean, very cheap oil, oil that is prized by the oil companies because it is relatively less polluting and has tremendous amounts of profits associated with it. So we do know that oil prices will fluctuate because of politics, but on average it will start to rise because we will be hitting Hubbert's Peak. Meanwhile, solar power is going to become cheaper and in 10 years or so the two curves could actually cross, and in 20 years a new game changer arrives and that is fusion power. The Europeans are betting the store on the ITER fusion reactor to be built outside Cadarache, France in Southern France, and if we have the power of the sun on the earth then sea water could drive all our machines. So if this scenario plays out as I predict, it means that global warming could actually be a problem only for the next several decades as we enter the solar era and the fusion era. The problem is we have already lofted so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and we will continue to do so for decades to come, that even before we enter the solar age and the fusion age we will have so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we will really screw up the weather. But on a long-term basis I think that solar energy and fusion power will be the solution, the ultimate solution, for the greenhouse problem. Directed / Produced byJonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

Michio Kaku: Why Einstein Gets the Last Laugh

http://bigthink.com
The physicist scoffed at the idea of quantum entanglement, calling it "spooky action at a distance." And while it has in fact been proven to exist, this entanglement can't be used to transmit any usable information.

Michio Kaku: Tweaking Moore's Law and the Computers of the Post-Silicon Era

What's beyond silicon? There have been a number of proposals: protein computers, DNA computers, optical computers, quantum computers, molecular computers.

Michio Kaku: A Black Hole in Our Own Backyard?

A wandering black hole may catch up with us one day and eat us for breakfast and it wouldn't even burp in the process.

http://bigthink.com
Scientists need to engage with the public and make statements about the great political issues of the day - because it impacts not just our science budget, but actually on our way of life.
Directed / Produced by
Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd

Watch the talented Reggie Watts perform at the Exploratorium August 9th, 2012. Reggie was at the Exploratorium for an Osher Fellowship, and he graciously joined us at the end of a live webcast on Mars to share a little of his own feelings about the red planet!

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